Contemporary cyber-attacks are increasing in frequency and sophistication with growing impacts such as large-scale privacy breaches, theft of intellectual property (IP), significant financial losses for businesses, and reputational damage. Cyber exploits can range from simplistic and opportunistic phishing campaigns to complex, covert and persistent attacks over time involving malicious actors with access to highly-skilled teams of hackers and advanced tools and resources.

The rapid commercialisation of space, and increased ease and lowering costs associated with launching satellites into space, has resulted in global supply chains of privatised satellite networks for commercial and military purposes. The Internet of Things (IoT) and associated connectivity with satellite networks has also created numerous vulnerabilities, which raises questions of how contemporary cyber-attacks could potentially impact satellites and the space security domain.

This whitepaper presents a novel Satellite Cyber Resilience Taxonomy derived from related contemporary space security and cyber-resilience literature. A taxonomy-guided research roadmap for SmartSat CRC is then proposed based on the identified literature gaps. The proposed research roadmap is based on four key satellite sub-systems: radio-link security; space hardware security; ground station security; and operations security, which are then further segmented and discussed according to the satellite resilience taxonomy.